The Cod and the Whale: Melville in the Time of Extinction

John Levi Barnard is an assistant professor of English at the College of Wooster, where he specializes in American literature and the environmental humanities. He is the author of Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017), and his essays and articles have appeared in PMLA and American Literature. His current book project tracks the concomitant emergence of a global animal economy and the crisis of anthropogenic mass extinction.

Abstract

This essay tracks the interrelated histories of the cod and the whale from John Smith’s colonial American vision of abundance to the near disappearance of the living resources he described as inexhaustible. Working at the intersections of animal studies, food studies, and the environmental humanities—and considering cultural artifacts from Smith’s tracts and Herman Melville’s fiction to Cheryl Savageau’s poetry and the underwater sculpture of Jason deCaires Taylor—the essay reads the commodification and consumption of these creatures as constitutive elements of an extinction-producing economy. Within this reading, the cod and the whale appear as exemplary figures not only for the important distinction between the edible and the exotic animal—wild food and wildlife—but also for the larger historical relation between “animal capital” and mass extinction.